The ubiquitously expressed Orai Ca2+ channels are gated through a unique process of intermembrane coupling with the Ca2+-sensing STIM proteins. Despite the significance of Orai1-mediated Ca2+ signals, how gating of Orai1 is triggered by STIM1 remains unknown. A widely held gating model invokes STIM1 binding directly to Orai1 pore-forming helix. Here we report that an Orai1 C-terminal STIM1-bind...

An important aim of the current research effort in artificial intelligence and robotics is to achieve cooperative agent behavior for teams of robots in real-world scenarios. Especially in the RoboCup scenario, but also in other projects like Nexus, agents have to cooperate efficiently to reach certain goals. In the RoboCup project, cooperative team-play and team strategies similar to real world...

The crime-terror nexus includes two independent, but related, components. First, it incorporates the straightforward involvement in criminal activities by terrorists as a source of funding, and second, it refers to the linkages between organized criminal organizations and terrorist groups. Indeed, the criminal and political organizations appear to be learning from each other, adopting each othe...

Abstract Many studies examine the correlation between use of resources such as water, energy and land, production food. These nexus focus predominantly on large scale systems, often considering social dimensions only in terms access to participation decision-making process, rather than individual attitudes behaviours with respect resource use. Such a concept is relevant urban agriculture (UA), ...

The goal of this project is to develop solutions to enhance interoperability between bioinformatics applications. Most existing applications adopt different data formats, forcing biologists into tedious translation work. We propose to use of Nexus as an intermediate representation language. We develop a complete grammar for Nexus and we adopt this grammar to build a parser. The construction hea...

The recent development of microarray technology provided unprecedented opportunities to understand the genetic basis of aging. So far, many microarray studies have addressed aging-related expression patterns in multiple organisms and under different conditions. The number of relevant studies continues to increase rapidly. However, efficient exploitation of these vast data is frustrated by the l...

Effective field theories exploit a separation of scales in physical systems in order to perform systematically improvable, model-independent calculations. They are ideally suited to describe universal aspects of a wide range of physical systems. I will discuss recent applications of effective field theory to cold atomic and molecular few-body systems with large scattering length.